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WD_346/ 2007
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Works on paper: Drawings 4 | | Medium: | oilstick on paper | | Size (inches): | 25.6 x 17.7 | | Size (mm): | 650 x 450 | | Catalog #: | WD_0346 | | Description: | Signed, date and copyright in pencil on the reverse.
Moses of Michelangelo -
"It is possible, therefore, that a work of art of this kind needs interpretation, and that until I have accomplished that interpretation I cannot come to know why I have been so powerfully affected. I even venture to hope that the effect of the work will undergo no diminution after we have succeeded in thus analyzing it." - Sigmund Freud, 1914.
Curator's Comments:
Freud felt the need to combine the pleasures of intellectual understanding and aesthetic appreciation. His “reading” of Michelangelo’s statue deals with the sculptor’s intention and with the attempt by the subject, Moses, to control his angry reaction to the infidelity of his followers. This control and this anger are things with which the founder of psychoanalysis seemed to identify.
-www.loc.gov/exhibits/freud/ex/168.html
The Joke in "The Moses of Michelangelo": Imagination and Creativity
Vann Spruiell, M.D.
Since I was an adolescent, I have been particularly fascinated with what could be known of the lives of certain major geniuses, particularly Freud's, later Michelangelo's -- and still later, Diego Rivera's. I have been interested in other great men and women, of course, but these three linked themselves, in a sense, through the people who were important to them in very important ways -- thus part of them, whether in actuality or in imagination. Among the most interesting was the Pope Julius II -- and a baby -- Freud's little brother, who died when Sigmund was only eleven months old.
The paper was presented at the Hampstead International Colloquium on "The role of Fantasy in the Adaptive Process," October, 1983. It published by the Psychoanalytic Study of the Child in 1985 (Vol. 30, Pp. 473- 492.) I am grateful to the Editors for permission to reprint it here. I have re-edited it lightly, mostly to make it more clear for the reader. I am also grateful to my friends, Drs. Leonard Shengold, Edward Weinshel, and others for their helpful criticisms of earlier versions.
*****
A set of particular acts of imagination by Freud were gathered in the paper, "The Moses of Michelangelo" ( 1914a); the paper is an example of Freud's own remarkable creativity. But the sources of data and insights about "creativity" are generally problematic in all disciplines; the limitations of psychoanalysis applied to the biographies of great creators, or to the minds of unusually gifted patients, are acknowledge by practically all analysts. Still, keeping sources and limitations in mind, we psychoanalysts do study the reaches, the depths, of individual human minds in disciplined ways that can't be approached by other groups of scientists or scholars. The collectivity of psychoanalytic knowledge allows for certain generalizations.
When works on creativity and imaginativeness lack foundations made out of disciplined studies of individuals in depth, the superstructures are flawed. The Act of Creation, by Arthur Koestler (1964), and Imagination, by Harold Rugg ( 1963), bear witness. Koestler and Rugg, nonanalysts, present valuable ideas, especially when borrowed or derived from psychoanalysis. This holds especially in the case of Koestler, who ignored most of Freud's work (despite intellectual knowledge of it), or, when he did mention it did so sparingly and almost sneeringly.
Yet, practicing analysts are daily privy to the secret imaginations of people who are usually at least intelligent, often talented, sometimes gifted, and occasionally genuinely creative -- in reparative and evolutionary, if not revolutionary ways (Spruiell, 1977). Out of the fecund psychic swamps in which we live, we pay -- we should pay -- close attention to our own imaginations. And psychoanalysts often measure up to their patients: they are usually at least intelligent, often talented, sometimes gifted, and occasionally even creative -- in those evolutionary, reparative ways suggested above, if not often revolutionary ways. It pleases me to believe that most analysts are more or less imaginative -- unless they set up inner walls against that part of themselves. After all, psychoanalysts work simultaneously stimulated and deprived; they are denied immediate gratifications but posed unending emotional puzzles.
But it is hard to examine the workings of ordinary imagination, and harder to study the unusual imaginations of radical innovators (Spruiell, 1977). Unfortunately, contemporary revolutionary geniuses rarely seek analysis. Even if they did, little or nothing could be communicated publicly about them by their analysts. Nor do would-be or actual heroes knowingly volunteer their most interesting secrets to biographers, nor write them down in their own autobiographies. Public writings are made as much to conceal as reveal.
Freud, more than most other geniuses, opened his soul to the world to an incredible degree, partly against his inclinations, but necessarily, he thought, because of his quests. I have chosen "The Moses of Michelangelo" to explore Freud's extraordinary imagination at work, for several reasons which will become clear. Among them is his paper's exquisite condensation of private meanings with public purposes. The exploration will come upon several apparently disparate topics. The first of these has to do with jokes; the second, the strange fascination that Michelangelo's statue of Moses had for Freud -- a fascination that was itself fascinating; finally, a discussion of what generalizations, if any, can be made about imaginative activities and the limitations of these generalizations.
JOKES
Picasso once said that every good work of art is a kind of joke. Diego Rivera, the revolutionary Mexican muralist, agreed.1 Every piece of worthwhile art, properly understood, is not only like a joke, it is shocking. It must connect its elements in a new way; the world comes to be seen in a new way. A punch line of a joke may get a laugh, or perhaps only a smile. A first view of a great work of art may make one smile, more likely not. But it will be shocking, often without the viewer knowing quite why. "So art may not be a joke," Rivera said, "but it is always like one."
Freud completed his paper, "The Moses of Michelangelo," on New Year's Day, 1914. He had been thinking about it for at least 13 years, struggling with it, talking to his colleagues about it. His thoughts reached a pitch of intensity in 1912 and 1913. But once the paper was completed, he still did not want to publish it. Jones, Ferenczi, Abraham, Rank, and Sachs were dismayed. Freud told them he had more doubts about its conclusions than usual; he worried that it might seem amateurish. The paper meant something more to him than other papers had. Finally, he gave in to his friends' good advice, but he still insisted that it be published anonymously! Why? "It is only a joke," he wrote Jones, "but perhaps not a bad one." To Abraham, he also wrote, "It is only a joke" Jones, 1955, p. 366).
Not for 10 years would Freud publicly admit authorship. Nineteen years after its completion, he wrote Edoardo Weiss: "My feeling for this piece of work is rather like that towards a love-child. For three lonely September weeks in 1913 I stood every day in the church in front of the statue, studied it, measured it, sketched it, until I captured the understanding for it which I ventured to express in the essay only anonymously. Only much later did I legitimatize this non-analytical child" (Jones, 1955, p. 367).
Every day by himself before a piece of marble for three weeks? Love-child? This after 11 years of regular visits to the object of his fascination? And then he was unwilling to put his name to the paper. Freud had had similar uncharacteristic reactions to "Totem and Taboo" and later would to "Moses and Monotheism," two other works he was inclined to publish anonymously. "The Moses of Michelangelo" was more than a demonstration of the application of the psychoanalytic way of thinking, more than a scholarly exercise. It was a work of art itself, thus a personal statement. But was Freud being self-deprecatory and trivializing when he called it a joke? One would not think so, in view of the letter to Edoardo Weiss about his "love-child."
Before briefly examining another great work of his, the much neglected Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, where Freud found similarities between jokes and works of art, it would be worthwhile to draw a sketch of the "love-child." That child was the product of breaking the rules which purport to separate science from art, rules which would dictate conformity and submission to authority rather than revolution, and rules which call only for conventional solutions to oedipal dilemmas.
THE MOSES OF MICHELANGELO
The essay begins with a kind of a joke. Its title has a footnote attached, supposedly supplied by the editors but obviously by Freud himself. An apology is made for the unconventionality of the contribution, but the explanation is offered that the anonymous author's "mode of thought has in point of fact a certain resemblance to the methodology of psycho-analysis" (1914a, p. 211). Confessing himself to be a layman in the field of art or its history, Freud explains that he puzzles over the power of a work of art to so grip an admirer. It can only have to do with the intention of the artist. Mere intellectual understanding cannot suffice the diviner; what the artist "aims at is to awaken in us the same emotional attitude, the same mental constellation as that which in him produced the impetus to create" (p. 212). To understand a work of art like the statue of Moses, it is necessary to interpret it. That is the only way to discover the intentions and emotional activities of the artist.
Freud writes of his peculiar fascination for Michelangelo's statue in the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli, originally designed to be one of the two central figures of the grand tomb to be built for Pope Julius II. Although Freud could not allow himself to visit the statue until September 5, 1901, he almost certainly had seen copies of the work in Vienna and in the Louvre. In the Louvre, also, were the originals of the famous Heroic and Dying Captives, which Michelangelo had intended for the tomb (Liebert, 1983).
The conventional assumption has been that the Moses represents the prophet in startled rage at the blasphemy of his followers -- an instant before he smashes the Tablets. "How often have I mounted the steep steps from the unlovely Corso Cavour to the lonely piazza where the deserted church stands, and have essayed to support the angry scorn of the hero's glance! Sometimes I have crept cautiously out of the half-gloom of the interior as though I myself belonged to the mob upon whom his eye is turned the mob which can hold fast no conviction, which has neither faith nor patience, and which rejoices when it has regained its illusory idols" (p. 213).
But the interpretations offered by nonpsychoanalytic scholars of other aspects of the great statue are consistent only in their contradictions. Certain peculiarities are interpreted as having various meanings -- or no meaning at all. "Has then," Freud asks (p. 215), "the master-hand indeed traced such a vague or ambiguous script in the stone, that so many different readings of it are possible?"
The master-hand had not. Freud develops, and argues for, his own daring thesis, a thesis well known to all psychoanalysts. Michelangelo had not depicted the Biblical Moses about to rise up in wrath and cast down the tablets. Moses had started to his feet, but felt the tablets slipping from under his arm. Then, contrary to the Bible, but according to Michelangelo, he controlled himself, sank back into a sitting position, and saved the tablets: "Michelangelo must have had the presumption to emend the sacred text and to falsify the character of that holy man" (p. 230). He converts Moses "so that the giant frame with its tremendous physical power becomes only a concrete expression of the highest mental achievement that is possible in a man, that of struggling successfully against an inward passion for the sake of a cause to which he has devoted himself ' (p. 233; my italics).
Why would Michelangelo do such a thing for the central figure which was to identify Moses with Julius II himself? Freud stresses the intensity of the attachment between Julius and Michelangelo, the similarities between these passionate and violent men, and the similar grandness in their designs -- the one in terms of the reformation and reestablishment of the Papal supremacy, the other in terms of art the likes of which had not been seen before. Freud speculates that Michelangelo, as the more introspective of the two, was reproaching both, "thus, in self-criticism, rising superior to his own nature" (p. 234.).
Freud, more than most men, understood the sources of his insights. He was a great admirer of great men and had a pantheon of heroes with whom he identified. The most important was probably Moses. But he was identified with Michelangelo too, and likely with the great Julius II. He also identified Julius with one of the most important of his infantile objects.2 The struggle envisioned in the paper had a general meaning, "the highest mental achievement that is possible in a man." It also had personal meanings having to do with three spheres: (1) Freud's feelings about -- one might say transferences to -- his own great creation, the concepts of psychoanalysis. His own "highest mental achievement" was then endangered by the defections of Jung and Adler. (2) The necessities of his outside professional life: to retain his leadership and control his own passions for the sake of a higher cause. (3) The resolution of specific conflicts which had arisen during infancy, which had manifested themselves repeatedly in his adult life -- particularly before periods of great creativity. The resolution was manifest in Freud's subsequent life: after the break with Breuer, the death of his own father, the rupture with Fliess, and the loss of Jung, there were to be no more fathers acknowledged in that life.3
JOKES AND THEIR RELATION TO THE UNCONSCIOUS CONTEXT
Freud's works, especially those written during his several phases of great productivity, should not be read singly; they should be read in blocks. Different as individual papers from the same timeframes may seem on the surface, they are all related. For example, after the preparatory monographs on Leonardo (1910) and Totem and Taboo (1913), he published in 1914, besides three technical papers, the "Moses," an artistic statement, "On the History of the Psycho-analytic Movement," a professional statement; and two important theoretical statements, one major and the other minor, "On Narcissism" and "Reflections on Schoolboy Psychology."
Similarly, in 1905 he published the "Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria," Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, and Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious -- and two minor papers as well. In fact, Freud wrote the books on jokes and sexuality side by side. He kept the manuscripts by each other, and worked on one or the other as it pleased him. Among their common attributes is the view they give of Freud's imagination operating at different levels simultaneously. The two books, seemingly so different, are integrally related. During the next three years, he followed up certain of the motifs in these works with psychoanalytic applications to the fields of drama, literature, religion, sexual morality, and character.
The themes in these works began, of course, in the dream book (1900). They were continued in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901).4 Of the major and subsidiary themes contained in all these works are two more which I wish to emphasize here, even though they may seem extraneous: Freud delineated a model of the mind which would contain mundane states of ordinary, "normal" consciousness; everyday and necessary alterations of rationality encompassed in wit, jest, humor, jokes -- and, it must be stressed, art; the ubiquitous "slips" of the mind in daily life; the strange nightly states of dream life; and finally, psychopathology. Freud thought in 1900 in terms of junctures of chains of associations as "nodal points," and he believed that the contents of dreams came from them. He later came to believe that the final forms of all conscious psychic acts, not just dreams, came about from these nodal points. Freud wanted one model for the psychic apparatus, in which differences could be accounted for in terms of quantitative rather than qualitative distinctions. Freud was developing the economic point of view of his metapsychology.
The other major theme had to do with the understanding of the motivational role of conscious and unconscious sexuality, arising from diverse origins in earliest childhood, finally organized and synthesized during adolescence as genitality. Freud was able to elucidate the role of the sexual drive in all of mental life, from the most primitive to the most advanced, from the most ordinary to the most exalted. Freud was honing his concepts of drives as motivational forces, countered by opposing transforming and altering forces: along with the economic, he was developing dynamic, genetic, and structural (Ucs.-Pcs.-Cs.) points of view.
In summary, in this paper, as he had in Totem and Taboo (1913), he was consolidating and fleshing out the contributions of The Interpretation of Dreams.5 Having begun with the study of pathology the study of pathological states supposedly in one kind of human being, the patient, by another kind of human being, the doctor -- Freud moved to the view of their possessing psychic apparatuses which were qualitatively identical. Many differences among individuals which were apparently qualitative in nature were actually quantitative differences. Doctor, patient, dreamer, joker, creator, and scoundrel have fundamentally similar minds. Lewin (1955) claims that Freud admitted that he had subsequently "forgotten" that the structure of a symptom and the structure of the analytic situation resemble the structure of the dream and the activities of the dreamer. He "forgot" when he developed his theories of narcissism, when the dream became equivalent to psychotic operations. But -- so this essay argues -- he "remembered" his earlier discovery in a disguised way in the same year, 1914, in the form of the Moses paper, only to lose the insight again. He "remembered" again, consciously, in "Analysis Terminable and Interminable" (1937).
Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905) was stimulated, according to Jones (1955, p. 335), by complaints by Fliess that Freud relayed so many bad jokes, and was so intrigued by plays on words. It is to be noted that "Three Contributions. . . " was also stimulated by Fliess -- who, however, protested that Freud "forgot" that the concept of universal bisexuality was his own. A bitter controversy ensued, and the relationship was finally destroyed.
The Joke book, one of Freud's most important, has been neglected in English for several reasons. Jokes are even harder to translate than poems. Freud did not revise this book, as he repeatedly revised the ones on dreams and sexuality. Further, there has been a general coarsening of taste in the Western World. Many jokes that would have been adjudged daring, funny, or risqué in 1905 have become "bad jokes" today. Finally, Der Witz does not have quite the meaning of either "joke" in English, which has a wider meaning, or "wit," which has a narrower meaning. Nevertheless, it is a pity that the work is so ignored. The Joke book bubbles with ideas, many not further elaborated to this day. And it is both ground to figure, and figure to ground to its companion, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.
Freud wanted to explain the pleasure obtained from jokes. He thought it depended on their techniques as well as their tendencies. Techniques involve condensation, displacement, indirect presentation by means of allusion, plays on words, the breaking of ordinary burdensome rules of logic, and the establishment of unexpected connections between disparate ideas. It is this latter that Koestler (1964) calls "bisociation," the coming together of lines of thought from different levels of the mind. The same process was depicted by Freud in 1900 in his "nodal points" of crossing lines of associations. These techniques are like those that operate in sexual foreplay. Foreplay derives from the diverse infantile roots of sexuality, the "component instincts." In "harmless" jokes, the pleasure is like the "harmless" play with words in childhood and the more obvious forms of "harmlessness," i.e., the supposedly non-sexual play of older children and adolescence. In "tendentious" jokes, which always have to do with more genitally organized erotic and aggressive sources, there is a sudden organization of the pregenital components into foreplay, with a surprising, even shocking, climax, an orgastic-like discharge. Such jokes allow access to ordinarily suppressed unconscious fantasies, and combine them with preconscious fantasies on other levels. The result is a discharge and a saving of energy equivalent, Freud thought, to the forces ordinarily maintaining the repression. "Harmless jokes," according to Freud, resemble the non-orgastic play of children more directly.
What dreams, fantasies, humor, wit, symptoms, creative acts -- what psychic acts have in common -- is that all emanate from a psychic structure shared in qualitative essentials by almost all human beings. Following Waelder (1930), we would say that every psychic act obeys the principle of multiple determination and function. More specifically, what creative acts and jokes, and to a lesser extent, dreams, share is the sudden, shocking, joining, by the viewer or listener, of previously buried sexual and aggressive fantasies with fantasies more closely related to everyday, conscious perception.
But who makes up jokes? What impels them to do it? What are the dynamics of the creation of a work of art? Freud did not know, nor do we. In 1930, he remarked: "Even the best and fullest of them [biographies of great men] could not answer the two questions which alone seem worth knowing about. It would not throw any light on the riddle of the miraculous gift that makes an artist, and it could not help us to comprehend any better the value and effect of his works" (p. 211). However, we do understand more about the riddles of two internal, intrapsychic creations: the relative resolution of the oedipus complex and the reorganization of libidinal development in adolescence. Both resemble works of art: they bring together new conscious and unconscious possibilities in tangible forms. Both synthesize, organize, gratify, stabilize, serve adaptive purposes. Both involve the creation of new structures, the superego proper at the end of the oedipal period, and a new, adult-like ego ideal in mid-adolescence. The latter allows and combines genital orgasms and genital love, while repressing perverse fantasies or subsuming them under what we classify as foreplay.
FREUD'S IMAGINATION
Freud created a work of art with several characters in it: the Biblical Moses transmuted into the Moses of the statue, the sculptor, Michelangelo, and the Pope, Julius II. But there are always other characters existing implicitly in a dream, a play, or a work of art. The most important of these shadowy or even invisible figures is the dreamer, the playwright, the artist. "The Moses of Michelangelo" has to do with Freud himself. If that is acknowledged, other figures relevant to his present and past -- all the way to infantile times -- help set the context. Some even appear in disguise. Some do not appear at all, but are nevertheless there. If we imagined a play about the girlhood of the Empress Josephine, we would have to think of Napoleon, whether his name were mentioned or not. Just as the examination of a dream would force us to think about what relevant players had been left out, so it is profitable to think about those relevant players not mentioned in Freud's paper. They can be approached through mention of certain historical and mythological facts about Moses, Michelangelo, Julius II, and Freud himself. All or most of these facts were known to Freud. Looked at in this way, a number of common themes emerge which can be inferred to be contents of Freud's mind. The possession of certain historical and mythological facts was the raw material, and the insights into motivational themes were the tools in the workroom of Freud's imagination. The use of the materials and tools is another matter, one which is much more mysterious.
The Biblical account of the birth of Moses, his abandonment during infancy, rescue, and subsequent career as hero, conforms to Rank's Myth of the Birth of a Hero (1959). Only two comments need be offered here. One has to do with the three-years older brother of Moses, Aaron. Freud does not mention him in this particular paper, but he is nonetheless crucial to it: Aaron was the traditional founder and head of the Jewish priesthood. Earlier, he had served as the "mouth" of Moses when the two were seeking the release of the Jews from Egypt. His magic rod also helped impress the Pharaoh, who acceded to the Exodus. After serving with Moses, Aaron later betrayed him. It was he who made the golden calf; it was the sight of that icon that caused Moses to cast down the tablets in rage. The other seemingly extraneous comment to be made here is the reminder of the existence of a large literature concerning the importance of Freud's identification with Moses (Shengold, 1972). It has been mentioned that the statue of Moses was planned as one of the two central figures of the tomb of Julius II, a tomb that was to be the greatest monument in the Western world. The statue of Moses was to represent Julius, whose ambitions were to emulate not only the prophet but St. Paul as well. In one of the great variety of plans for this tomb, dragged out over the years, was a proposed statue of St. Paul to match the one of Moses. The theme of this monumental stone drama: Julius was to revolutionize his people and his church, temporally and religiously. It has been mentioned that Freud believed that Michelangelo had the temerity to alter the actions of the Biblical Moses, alter them in such a way that the statue represented someone more like Julius, and more, we have the right to presume, like himself. Clearly, Julius was to be Paul's equal, even superior -- perhaps superior to Moses!
But the great crown itself, the tomb, finally emerged only as a pathetic travesty of Michelangelo's vision. He died believing his life to have been a failure for not having been allowed to make that tomb. Completion would have confirmed the artist's hubris: he, Michelangelo, would have been greatest of them all!
Michelangelo Buonarroti was the oldest son born to a mother who died when he was six -- after producing four more little brothers. He seems hardly to have known her, as he was left with a family to nurse him in the village of Settignano, where most of the people worked as stonecutters. He was reclaimed by his father when he was put in school in Florence. After an apprenticeship to a sculptor, his talent was noticed by Lorenzo Magnifico, who took him into the Medici household.5 During his subsequent adolescence, Michelangelo was exposed daily, intimately, to the greatest minds of that part of the Renaissance, the philosopher Ficino, the poet Politan, Lorenzo himself, and others making up the members of the "Humanistic Academy" of the Medicis. Michelangelo not only became the genius we know as sculptor and painter, he became an accomplished poet as well. He was academically better educated than his future patron, Julius II. It is sometimes forgotten that it was the complex intelligence embodied in the art that appealed to the Pope. Along with his
successful intentions to reunite the Papal states, he aimed to further a humanistic religious revolution which would prefigure the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.
Michelangelo never married, and as far as is known was never involved in any way with women (with the exception of an autumnal, Platonic friendship with the elderly Vittoria Colonna). He was, however, devoted to his father and brothers, and, when not directly supporting them, led them, lectured them, and lent to them. It is known that he had passionate attachments to other men, especially if they were young and handsome. The general assumption has been that he was homosexual, and that is relevant to this essay -- although his actual sexual behavior is not.
Biographical material on Pope Julius is scant. He came from a family that Faulkner would have regarded Snopesian. His uncle was ruthlessly ambitious, not only for himself, but to raise the status of his family. The uncle rose from a low position to become Pope Sixtus IV in 1471. He was not an effective Pope, but was a master of simony and nepotism. However, he did patronize the arts, and he built the Sistine Chapel. After his election, the new Pope made his wastrel nephew, Riario, then 25, a Cardinal; he had raised Riario himself, taken him from his sister as a child, brought him up as a spoiled son. He also made a Cardinal the future Julius, his impoverished brother's son, Giuliano della Rovere, two years older than Riario. After the abortive attempt to assassinate the Medici brothers, Lorenzo and Giuliano, Cardinal Riario died, or was murdered. Although Sixtus IV was aware of the plot, it is not known if his nephew Giuliano had any hand in it. After Cardinal Riario's death, Sixtus IV not only excommunicated the Medicis, but grieved in a fashion gossips called "unseemly." But then he turned his attentions to his brother's son, the future Julius II. Julius, too, profited by the death of a favored "brother."
Giuliano della Rovere, like his rival, Cardinal Riario, was a man of the world. He acknowledged three daughters as his own. He became Pope in 1503, as his uncle Sixtus IV had, by the liberal use of simony. However, after he was elected Pope, he became a reformer, and tried to rid the Church of both simony and nepotism. But, regrettably, he needed money for his enterprises and, if anything, intensified the practice of selling indulgences. The steady increases in the price needed to buy special fates for the souls of the dead, stimulated by Julius and the two Medici Popes who followed, had much to do with the Protestant Reformation.
Freud was born on May 6, 1856, in a small town in what is now Czechoslovakia. He was the first child of a young woman of 21 and a much older father. The family was Jewish, middle-class, and included, at least living nearby, a married half-brother about the same age as his mother, a nephew who was a little older, a niece a little younger, and a Catholic Nanny. When he was 11 months old, a brother was born. Eight months later, in December, 1857, when Sigmund was a toddler of 19 months, the younger brother died. A year later, on December 31, 1858, a sister, Anna, was born.6 Four more daughters and one son were to follow in quick succession. With the birth of Anna, the Nanny was dismissed for reasons which mystified the child. When Freud was three, economic necessity made for relocations of the families; they must have been important to the young boy. His immediate family moved to Vienna. The half-brothers, Emanuel and Philipp, with the nephew John and the niece, Pauline, moved to England.
Jones (1953, p. 4f.) relates perceived omens contributing to the family myths from infancy that a hero had been born. Whatever post-hoc omens are found for heroes, there is no doubt that Sigmund was a gifted, adored, oldest son. Every effort was made to stimulate the child and to find opportunities for him. But if we judge from what is known about the effects of personal losses during infancy and early childhood, Freud's multiple losses can't be ignored. Freud certainly did not ignore them. He revealed more about his unconscious conflicts in his public and private writings than any famous man in history.
Freud lost his place at the breast at 11 months to his infant brother -- Julius.7 Julius was the name that supplied the infantile component of Freud's parapraxis when he was unable to remember the name of the poet, Julius Mosen. In a letter to Fliess on October 3, 1897, Freud alluded to the impact that the fulfillment of his death wishes toward little Julius had had -- a tendency that remained ever after (Freud, 1950, p. 219).8 There is no mention of the shattering effect the death of Julius must have had on the family, particularly his mother.9
Freud also lost his Nanny at the same time Anna was born. Later, he lost his uncle, nephew, niece, and family home. With the consolidation of his oedipal conflicts, the boy undoubtedly condensed and reworked all of these losses. No other inference is reasonable. According to Freud's fantasies during his unending self analysis, his repetitive needs to attach himself to other men -- the most famous of whom were Breuer, Fliess, and Jung -- and then to break with them were connected with murderous oedipal conflicts with his father and, at the same time, tied to his fantasies about Julius (Jones, 1955, p. 146). Fliess, a man younger than Freud by two years, and thus in a similar position to him as Julius, was to be the Great Man. Freud unconsciously had to restore and destroy Julius, again and again. Later, Jung was to be the Joshua, destined to enter the Promised Land, while he, Freud, could have no more than a view from Mt. Pisgah. Freud's famous fainting spells, each in a context of murderous feelings between father and son, each referring to Freud's myth about Julius, each preceding an agonizing break, first with Fliess, then with Jung, were symptoms of the struggle, before its effective mastery, of oedipal fantasies regressively expressed in terms of preoedipal object losses.
After 1914, Freud's search for a father, for restitution, for being murdered like Abel, for being like Ishmael banished into the wilderness in favor of a brother, for giving away his birthright for a mess of pottage like Esau, for betraying his brother like Aaron, for being expelled by his brothers like Joseph,10 all seemed to end. With the ending, Freud became the father. He identified further with his own ego ideal, in part transubstantiated as "The Moses of Michelangelo." Psychoanalysis could be revolutionized once more: put it in the basic form we know today.
Michelangelo's Moses was for Freud -- at once -- Moses, an altered Moses, Michelangelo, Julius II, Michelangelo himself, Freud's Julius-brother-father, and Freud himself. All in relation to early separations; all in relation to brothers and fathers, to fratricides and patricides. Freud's paper proposed solutions to riddles. an artistic riddle; a riddle having to do with the mastery of passions in favor of civilization; a riddle about the threatened fragmentation of psychoanalysis; a deeper, personal riddle having to do with Freud's inner conflicts about mastering oedipal guilt, and his reluctance to acknowledge his own fatherhood.
THE INFLUENCE OF PSYCHOANALYS1S ON ART HISTORY
Did Freud's imaginative solution to the strange posture of Michelangelo's Moses stir the world of art history? It did not. Most art histories either treat his thesis as a joke, in the pejorative sense, or make no mention of it. Even the psychoanalyst best known for his interest in Michelangelo, Liebert ( 1983), discounts its "plausibility." Has Freud's imaginative reconstruction of Michelangelo's intentions about the statue, the meanings of his relationship with his alterego Julius II, the ambitions to make the greatest tomb known in Western history, or Freud's allusions to their complex urges to revolutionize and humanize the Church -- have any of these made any difference to colleagues in history, biography, and Renaissance studies? Apparently not.
Of course, scholars have known that Michelangelo was a gifted poet who had a complex and educated mind, partly as a result of his adolescent experiences in the palace of Lorenzo Magnifico. They have known that both Michelangelo and Julius II had quite complex religious conceptions -- in keeping with the spasms that were taking place in the beliefs of Western man. Although Julius appreciated art, the important quality of his collaboration with Michelangelo was religious and philosophical in nature. Julius meant to build a St. Peter's, reunite the Papal states, and establish a new Church in the religious sense. But there is little mention of the meanings of the art he coaxed, goaded, and cajoled Michelangelo and Raphael to express. These were new meanings that came before Luther, before the Reformation, before the Counter-Reformation.
And was Michelangelo capable of presuming to rewrite the sacred texts? It is not hard at all to believe. One only needs to think of him as a ferocious old genius, grieving that his life had been a failure because he could not build the Tomb. The struggle over the ferocity shows in the Moses, controlling a towering passion. Yet, one thinks also of the statues the older Michelangelo made, with their almost unbearable poignancy. One thinks of his chalk portrait of the great Pope: an older, sadder Julius, then near death. It was a portrait that rivaled Raphael's masterpiece, also in the Uffizi. One thinks of Michelangelo's passion still alive in his 80s, when he furiously hacked away with his mallet at the Pieta now in the Duomo -- he could not get one of Christ's legs right. For me, that work, scarred by its creator, is the greatest of all. Michelangelo, like Julius, like Freud -- like all great geniuses -- was unbelievably audacious. Those who would be geniuses, but fail, are called grandiose.
Was Freud "right" in his interpretations of Michelangelo's intentions? I don't know -- who could know what was in the sculptor's mind? But I think Freud was as "right" as we can expect anyone to be, if only for the fact that no other plausible explanation exists for the statue's peculiarities. I certainly think Freud was being "right" about his own struggles to maintain and even institute another revolution in his own psychoanalysis, struggling to control his own passion for the sake of a higher cause, unsure that he would prevail. "At the moment," he wrote
Ferenczi 10 1/2 months after completing the paper, "the situation in Vienna makes me feel more like the historical Moses than the Michelangelo one" (Jones, 1955, p. 367).
If it is reasonable to assume that Freud's "The Moses of Michelangelo" had meanings in terms of his attachment to a "collective alternate" (Greenacre, 1954), psychoanalysis, and had meanings in terms of his outside professional and personal life, is it reasonable to assume that it had to do with continuing unconscious fantasies whose pasts extended all the way back to Freud's infancy?
I believe there is no alternative to assuming that about any creator and his creation. We do have some intriguing details pertaining to Freud's early life and to the expression of derivatives of infantile conflicts later. Most of these details came from letters to Fliess, as Freud was conducting his self analysis. Others come from reliable observations made by those closest to him. Information hitherto unavailable will doubtlessly add to, and correct present information. Leaving aside documentary details, some of the unquestionable facts about Freud's life have been mentioned, along with some of the memories and reconstructions which he himself made and relayed to others. I believe Freud was essentially "right" about his own interpretations about his past, even if at the time he did not have the sophistication about infantile development now available.
THE JOKE
How was "The Moses of Michelangelo" a joke for Freud? It was a private joke, not to be shared. My guess is that despite the worry and pain, he finally prevailed and saw into his fascination: once more he had been doing and undoing the murder of little Julius -- a magical infantile fratricide which fronted for fantasies of two others, the crimes of patricide and filicide. Freud must have felt a shock in once more finding a repeatedly lost insight, and he must have felt something that goes along with once more undoing the repression of a familiar fantasy: wry humor—an awareness of the personal comedy which cohabits with personal tragedy. Freud, by then doomed with cancer, expressed this mixture in "Humour" (1927). In times of peril, a kindly superego reassures the frightened childlike ego that things can't be quite as bad as they might seem -- or as they might in fact be. It is possible that there was another private joke, but one that was less important: Freud wrote a paper touching upon the most profound issues of psychoanalysis -- passion, redolent with derivatives of sexuality and aggression -- without once mentioning either word!
The "Moses of Michelangelo" was analogous to a good interpretation. It imaginatively brought together elements of transference, "outside" life, and infantile past. This time the interpretation apparently finally "took." The sequence of finding and losing an idealized man was not to be repeated in Freud's lifetime. The paper is also a work of art. It allows admirers to share the artist's imagination, his method, and the personal truth which can go beyond it to become collective truth.
SUMMARY
In this paper I have tried to demonstrate (but not account for) the intricacies of the creation by Freud of a paper that had a special personal meaning. "The Moses of Michelangelo" was the product of the imaginative processes of a genius. Freud was first fascinated with the statue, then fascinated with his own fascination. Over 13 years, he spent many, many hours standing before the statue, brooding about its meaning. The final work of art— and that is what the paper turned out to be—came as a result of insights that were simultaneously derived from unresolved conflicts out of Freud's infantile past, unresolved conflicts in his contemporary external world, and unresolved conflicts of a transference nature toward his own creation, psychoanalysis. The paper represented an actualization of a complex synthesis Freud made: it was at once a work of art which could be shared with others, an intimate (and highly "mutative") interpretation made to himself, and a joke that he enjoyed privately.
ENDNOTES
1. Reported to me by his daughter, Ruth Rivera, in a series of interviews in 1970, in Houston, Texas.
2. Shengold's (1972) paper points to the same identification.
3. Even though, as Shengold (1972) convincingly infers, the repressed cravings and conflicts found denial and disguised expression in his ambivalent relations with his follower Abraham, and in his grief after Abraham's premature death.
4. The first indication known to us of Freud's interest in the subject of this book is in a letter to Fliess on August 26, 1898 (Freud, 1950, p. 261). Freud described his inability to recall the name of Julius Mosen, a well-known poet. His self analysis showed that he had "personal reasons" for repressing the name Mosen, that infantile material determined the repressions, and that the substitute names that did occur to him were, like neurotic symptoms, compromise formations. This was the first recorded conjunction by Freud of the names, Julius and Mosen.
5. (1997). Recently, I had an opportunity to read a paper by a Professor at the Queen Mary School of Law in London, "'In the Exigency of His Longing': Freud's Discovery of Law and Fiction in Totem and Taboo". It is to be published there in New Formations. The paper is a fascinating study of Freud's extension of the ideas put forward in the Interpretation of Dreams and Three Contributions to the Theory of Sexuality -- and is placed in the context especially of the later Group Psychology and Civilization and its Discontents. It avoids the typical "either-or" approaches toward myths that can't be "authenticated" and the opposite dismissal of scientific approaches by, for example, those with strong hermeneutic interests. It takes an "in-between" approach that includes ideas that are respectable but not necessarily subject to scientific investigation -- and it does not dismiss those areas which can be. But the paper's central points have to do with the extension of the respectability of Freud's conceptions -- without subjecting them to unnecessarily limiting dogmas -- especially those regarding excessive reductionism on the part of some scientists, or unrealistic idealizations of what constitutes science -- that too often become converted into "science-only" approaches to that which is valid and intellectually respectable.
6. Ironically, Lorenzo's younger brother, Giuliano, had been the victim of a famous murder plotted by the Cardinal Riario della Rovere, the cousin and fraternal rival of Julius (who may or may not have taken part in the plot) to destroy both of the Medicis. It can be safely presumed that Freud knew these facts. Whether he connected them or not will probably never be known to us. In a similar way, psychoanalysts can hardly resist paying attention to the fact that Freud was completing "The Moses of Michelangelo" during the anniversary of his infant brother's death, and completed it just after the anniversary of his sister's birth 56 years before. Everything we know about Freud's mind, however, suggest that he was particularly aware of such connections within himself.
6. Shengold (1972) follows Jones ( 1953) in emphasizing the importance of the name Julius for Freud—and, indeed, names of important people in general, particularly fathers.
7. In the same letter, he revealed presumably screen memories of seeing his mother "nudam" when he was between the ages of 2 and 2~/2, with the consequence that his "libido had been aroused." There, too, he told the fantasy that his original seducer had been the Nanny, that his "companion in (sexual) crime" had been his nephew John, and that the two little boys had treated his little niece "shockingly." It is to be noted that if the dating of the memory of seeing his mother nude were correct—and it probably was, because the date of the train trip when the incident occurred is known—his mother would have been in the latter stages of her pregnancy with Anna.
8. Another radical innovator who had a similar loss was Diego Rivera, whose identical twin died when he was 18 months old. Rivera (1960) describes the psychotic grief of his mother, necessitating his removal from the home for several years.
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